The pivot to China is definitely off

It’s fascinating to see that Spengler is no longer writing about the tremendous respect the Chinese harbor for his people and how amazingly similar they are.

The world will become a Chinese company store: Chinese banks will lend the money, Huawei will build the broadband network and sell the handsets, Alibaba and JD.Com will market the products, Ant Financial will make micro-loans, and Chinese companies will build airports and railroads and ports. As an investment banker for a Hong Kong boutique from 2013 to 2016, I saw this first hand, and reported it here. Among other things, Huawei is building most of Mexico’s new national broadband network, including 5G capability, in a consortium with Nokia financed by a group led by Morgan Stanley and the International Finance Corporation. Huawei also dominates telecommunications infrastructure in Brazil and other Latin American countries. China’s tech dominance in America’s neighborhood, remarkably, has occasioned no official comment from Washington.

In my view, this is far more alarming than what Gertz envisions. He writes, “China will control all deals and win any business arrangements it seeks by dominating the information domain and thus learning the positions of bidders and buyers. All Chinese companies will be given advantages in the marketplace.”

That simply isn’t the way things work. China will lock whole countries into Chinese hardware through state-financed national broadband networks, including Brazil and Mexico, where construction is underway. It understands the network effect that made Amazon and Facebook dominant players in the U.S. market, and will use its financial and technological head start to establish the same sort of virtual monopoly for Chinese companies throughout the Global South….

In China’s view, the “Century of Humiliation” that lasted from the First Opium War of 1848 to the Communist Revolution of 1949 was a temporary aberration that displaced China from its dominant position in the world economy, a position the present dynasty seeks to restore. If we do not want this to happen, we will have to dominate critical technologies, including quantum computing, quantum communications, broadband, Artificial Intelligence, and missile defense.

We, David? There is no we. Your short-sighted, self-centered tribe destroyed America and demoralized Western civilization because it harbors pathological hatred for Greece, Rome, and Christianity. But now you’re finally beginning to figure out that the Chinese are going to be considerably less tolerant of your subversive shenanigans than the West ever was and you’re utterly terrified as a result.

But who is going to protect you when you have chopped down all the trees that might have sheltered you? China is demonstrating the salient difference between power and influence, between external competition and internal subversion.

I definitely prefer Western civilization. But if forced to choose between Chung Kuo and Babel 2.0, I’ll take the former every time.